The Great Lakes Region: Chicago and Cleveland

This chapter reviews two human evolution exhibits located in the U.S. Great Lakes region. The first is an embedded component within the Evolving Planet gallery of Chicago’s Field Museum. The second exhibit occupies a moderately-sized, dedicated space in Cleveland’s Natural History Museum. The Field Museum has a deep anthropological history. Its temporary Hoffman exhibit, which reinterprets sculptures of the artist commissioned to produce bronzes for “The Races of Man” exhibit in the 1930s, allows consideration of changing views of race, a topic rarely included within modern human evolution exhibits. Although the human evolution section of Evolving Planet is small, importantly, it incorporates fossil primates. Additionally, multiple artistic reproductions by paleoartist Elisabeth Daynès are on display. While less well known than the Field Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s association with paleoanthropology stems from Au. afarensis discoveries in the 1970s and the series of curators involved in analyzing these fossil remains. A small regional museum at its core, this museum experiences a form of extended kinship with the local community and international heft with researchers due to its special ties to Ethiopia and its hominin fossils.